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Jonathan Sukhia@jon_s123 · Sep 19, 2026

College football lightning delays are getting absurd. So I went down the rabbit hole: how many people have actually…

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Summary

A researcher found no documented deaths from lightning during Division I college football games in the last 50 years, yet lightning delays have become increasingly stringent despite lightning deaths in the US overall declining from 70-100 annually in the 1970s to 20-30 today. The thread argues that modern lightning protocols represent excessive risk aversion disconnected from actual historical danger.

Summarized by ThreadOut AI from the full thread. May miss nuance — read the thread below.

  1. #1

    College football lightning delays are getting absurd. So I went down the rabbit hole: how many people have actually been killed by lightning during a Division I football game in the last 50 years? Thread 🧵

  2. #2

    1/ College football’s lightning-delay rules have become completely detached from the actual historical risk. I went looking for the obvious explanation: surely there must have been some wave of people getting killed by lightning at football games. There wasn’t.

  3. #3

    2/ There wasn’t. I asked ChatGPT to find a documented case of a player or fan being killed by lightning during a Division I college football game in the last 50 years. It couldn’t find one. Not recently. Not rarely. Not one documented case.

  4. #4

    3/ Meanwhile, lightning deaths in the US overall have COLLAPSED. In the late 1960s and 1970s, roughly 70 to 100 Americans were killed by lightning each year. Today it’s closer to 20 to 30 annually. So this is not a response to some growing public-safety crisis.

  5. #5

    4/ What actually changed is the rulebook. In 1997, 92% of surveyed Division I athletic departments in high lightning states didn’t even have a formal written lightning policy. Then came standardized protocols, commercial lightning detection, and the 30-minute rule.

  6. #6

    5/ Today a strike can be detected 8 miles from the stadium and the game gets suspended. Then you wait 30 minutes. Another strike happens 7 miles away with 3 minutes left on the clock? Start the entire 30 minutes over again. Nobody at the stadium even needs to see lightning.

  7. #7

    6/ There are roughly 800 FBS games a year. Over 50 years, call it ~40,000 games and well over a BILLION cumulative fan visits to college football stadiums. Again: I could not find a documented lightning death during a Division I game over that period.

  8. #8

    7/ / The result is an absurd monument to risk aversion: Lightning deaths are down. Detection is better. Yet games stop over distant strikes despite no documented Division I player or fan lightning death in 50 years.

  9. #9

    8/ This is what happens when everything gets neutered and sanitized in the interest of an abundance of safety. The actual risk was already microscopic. Deaths are down. Detection is better. But the response is more rules, more delays, and less tolerance for any risk at all.

  10. #10

    Blue skies over Tuscaloosa - but minimum 30 min delay … because #safety

  11. #11
    Corey Clark@Corey_Clark · Sep 19, 2026

    Nick Saban out here honoring teachers in the end zone. During a lightning delay. Is it dangerous out there or not? Don’t the lives of teachers matter too?